Chalk.com began when William Zhou decided he wanted to do something to help his former teachers. And three or four years later, about 120,000 other teachers are using the product he created.

Zhou, 23, is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Kitchener company that provides workflow-organization software for teachers. In its brief history, it’s gained a vast customer base by offering its product free to front-line teachers, and charging school boards for the administrative service and data.

The company’s sales this school year are on track to hit $1 million, and are up 400 percent over the previous school year.

And it all started when Zhou, then a student at the University of Waterloo, returned to his native Vancouver and visited a few of his high school teachers. As a young adult, he began to understand all the organizational challenges that teachers face – the class preparation grading papers, administration issued.

“I realized my teachers are actually my friends,” said Zhou in an interview last week. “What you don’t see as a student is all the preparation work they have to do … There are a lot of things that aren’t really seen by the students and that’s when I decided to help them out.”

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Chalk helps teachers to plan their entire day – it’s the productivity tool for the teaching profession.  It helps teachers plan their lessons and grade papers, but that is only the start. It also offers teachers analytics of how a class of 30 or so students is performing. That means teachers can identify the students who are struggling and need extra attention. And that, said Zhou, leads to an overall improvement in performance outcomes.

Zhou and Co-Founders  CTO Ryan McKay-Fleming and Sales Director Suraj Srinivas launched Chalk in 2012 and it didn’t catch on at first.

“We actually made a pretty big mistake,” said Zhou. “We started charging teachers.”

The product was popular but teachers were unwilling to pay for it. Then Chalk heard from a school district in Texas. Some teachers in the district had used the product and liked it so much that the district wanted it for all its teachers.

Zhou, Srinivas and McKay-Fleming changed their pricing model so it would be free for teachers and school boards would pay for it. The boards get two benefits from using the product: first, they can use it to disseminate curriculum to the teachers so they are all up-to-date on what should be taught; and second, the boards gain access to the data collected and analyzed by Chalk. Zhou said this second benefit is huge when assessing success rates.

Chalk has grown with $500,000 in seed funding, and its investors include BDC Capital, the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund as well as such angels as Ryan Holmes, founder of Hootsuite, and John Baker, founder of D2L Corp. It is a graduate of the Velocity accelerator and Zhou says it's benefited immeasuably by the community created by Communitech. 

Zhou said the company is not raising money now but will focus on continuing to build its North American customer base by helping teachers excel.

“Learning is innately human,” said Zhou. “We’re helping these teachers become super teachers. They are actually personalizing the education for each and every student.”